PC shopping: Hard drive or Solid State Drive?

Whenever geeks start discussion PC components, the topic of Solid State Drives invariably comes up. These drives, which use flash memory instead of spinning disks to store data, are the new Objects of Desire among those who really care about their hardware.

That’s because, in theory, they’re faster, quieter and cooler than standard drives. They also use less energy, an important factor in portable computing.

But really, the speed’s the thing. Those who want to wring every last ounce of performance from a PC envision lightning-quick boot times, sudden program launches and the end of cursors turning to hourglasses or spinning beach balls.

There’s one big problem, though: Cost. SSDs aren’t cheap, certainly not compared with commodity hard drives. In a piece written back in June, Lucas Mearian of Computerworld notes the price difference between the two is substantial:

Most consumer-grade SSDs from leading vendors now cost around $3 per gigabyte, while traditional hard drives cost about 20 to 30 cents per gigabyte for 2.5-in. laptop drives and 10 to 20 cents per gigabyte for 3.5-in. desktop drives, according storage market research firm Coughlin Associates Inc. In other words, even the cheapest 120GB SSDs are going to be around $300, though some are available on sale for less. So should you buy a high-capacity HDD for little cash or plunk down hundreds of dollars more for a fast, but lower-capacity, SSD? Or, should you wait?

Mearian’s question is the ultimate one for those building their own systems, or considering upgrading an existing computer from hard drive to SSD. Is that high cost worth it?

Certainly, if you look strictly at dollar amounts when matching gigabyte for gigabyte, an SSD is hard to justify. Smaller SSDs – say, around 64 GB – start at about $150 at Newegg. For $150, you can buy hard drives as big as 2 terabytes.

Now, a 64-GB drive is pretty small these days, but it’s adequate for a boot drive – one that holds the operating system and key programs. In addition, many of these smaller HDDs aren’t always dramatically faster than quality hard disks. For day to day tasks, most folks might not notice a difference.

Newer SSDs, and those with higher capacities, are finally generating the kinds of speeds techies drool over. But their prices will ultimately end that hardware lust. For example, a 160-GB drive starts in the $590 range at Newegg. If you want a 256-GB SSD, the largest mainstream capacity available, be prepared to shell out at least $600, and $700 is more typical.

If you feel you must shell out this kind of money now – rather than waiting for prices to drop, as they inevitably will – then you’ll want to pay attention to the speed of the drive, presuming that’s your motivation for owning one. Look at the Sequential Access Read and Write times, which will tell you how quickly the SSD can read/write data.

On a 64-GB drive, you’ll see read times in the 250 megabytes-a-second range, and writes starting around 70 MB/s. The read times on larger drives are around the same, but write times are faster, sometimes as high as 200 MB/s.

Frankly, I think any purchase of an SSD for most consumer computing is premature. Prices will come down, capacities will increase and today’s per-per-gigabyte ratio is way too high. For those hoping that SSDs will soon replace hard drives altogether . . . well, I don’t think that will happen in the foreseeable future.

In his Computerworld piece, Mearian quotes analysts who indicate that the price differential will remain for some time:

Coughlin Associates founder Tom Coughlin said per-gigabyte prices for HDDs and SSDs are dropping at the same pace — about 50% per year — so the sizeble price gap between the two will remain for years to come.

12 Responses

I agree with Dwight on this opinion: Frankly, I think any purchase of an SSD for most consumer computing is premature. Prices will come down, capacities will increase and today’s per-per-gigabyte ratio is way too high. For those hoping that SSDs will soon replace hard drives altogether . . . well, I don’t think that will happen in the foreseeable future.

I’ll take that one step further and predict that we’re going to see dual drives in laptops. I think the onboard DVD drives will be phased out of high-end laptops and replaced with SSD drives.

The ideal setup would be a smaller (64GB?) SSD and a cavernous (1TB?) 7200 RPM hard disk with a single external DVD drive that connects via Firewire or USB and can be used with any of your computers. I think this would yield the ideal combination of performance, storage capacity, and battery life.

The idea would be to put the operating and system and frequently used programs on the SSD. Put saved documents and less frequently used applications on the hard disk. Also put disk directory repair utilities on both drives (and make each drive a startup drive in case of trouble).

Huge hard drives are going to be needed because watching video on computers has become mainstream rather than a novelty . You need a big drive if you’re going to download and store feature length HD movies.

My work laptop (MacBook Pro) came with a 128 GB SSD, an unexpected surprise I only notice when amazed by the speed and noiselessness of the machine.

Now I’m shocked if an application launches in more than one second. Easily the best new computer hardware I’ve seen all year, and well worth off-loading your large video files to a network HDD. I didn’t have to pay for it, of course, but if I were looking for a new personal laptop, I’d splurge for the SSD over any other feature.

Flash memory degrades over time, and has a limited number of times its can be written to. While I wouldn’t use the term “damages”, it does not have limited write capabilities. However, there are things manufacturers have done to work around this (such as wear leveling). On the other hand, even relatively new hard drives can crash, so it likely evens out. For example, Intel’s X25-M SSD drive has a Mean Time Between Failures similar to those of some high-end server hard drives.

I have an old keyboard (Ensoniq EPS-16) that has a whopping 2 megs of flash memory. The operating system for the keyboard has been stored in that flash memory for about 16 years now. There has been no degradation, and the keyboard has always booted up fine.

If you are early to the dance you will always pay more, but in return, you get to use better hardware. Back in the 1980’s I spent roughly $2000 for a 5 meg hard drive subsystem (drive and interface card that was bigger than most modern motherboards), do I regret paying that much? No, and why? It allowed me to save time back when I was using a pokey RS model 1 as a computer, and just as we do now, I ended up paying several hundred more for a 15 meg drive to replace the 5 meg when it filled up.

Now that $2500 would buy me multiple terabytes, probobly more than the total capacity of all consumer hard drives totalled together back then, but if I had waited I wouldn’t have had the experiance I gained with that early hard drive, and I would have wasted hundreds if not thousands of hours waiting for files to save and load from floppy. To me, someone who has been active with small computers since 1977, $700 for a 256 gig ssd is chicken feed, more than I want to pay, but about the price I am willing to pay.

I am also willing to live with the 4 cyl motor that puts out about 140 hp in my car, I have no need to spend 6-7 times as much to get a car with a v12 that puts out 400 hp, or the 2 million that the car that ended up in salt water cost, but someone was willing to pay that, each person has to make a personal decision how much they are willing to pay for what they get, and then live with their choices, some are willing to pay for that extra power, which isn’t really required to do the job, yet gives them a good feeling if they have it around.

I bought my first dvd writer back when dvdr were still several dollars each, now they are perhaps $.20 each for single sided media, I was an early adopter there as well, by showing that people were willing to buy media more factories were put online to make them, the same will apply to ssd. My first cdwriter was a 2x writer, I wasn’t amoung the first but joined soon after. Back then there were articles questioning if writers were even needed for home users, nowdays, I wouldn’t buy a computer if I couldn’t hang a dvdwriter in or on it somewhere to write disks for backups and to put files on pass on to others. I still feel more comfortable giving someone a file on a dvdr than on a usb memory stick.

In 1984 I shelled out almost $500 (more than $750 in today’s dollars) for a hot FH 5¼-inch, 90-meg SCSI to set off my 286-12 (WITH a 287 math co-processor!) machine. That 256-GB SSD for $700 doesn’t sound that bad.

If I ever do buy a laptop I’d probably go with a SSD drive since, if they’re anything like the 16 gig compact flash cards that I use in my cameras, they can go both through the washer AND the dryer and still be operational.

A hybrid would be nice. Something that would fit in the space of a current hard drive. It would have enough room for your OS and applications on the SSD and a huge/fast disk drive for your files. It (or the OS) would need to be smart enough to optimize for file type. Without a way to make it (brain dead) simple, the typical user wouldn’t get it and the advantage would be lost to them.

I faced this same decision a few months ago when I installed the Win7 RC on my machine – I figured since I was reinstalling the OS, I might as well look into SSDs. After pricing them, I decided to go another route.

This method is definitely for “techies” only, but then again, I don’t think your average user even knows what an SSD is. What I did was pick up a used Dell PERC 5i RAID controller. You can get these off EBay for about $120 with the battery backup and extra cache memory. These controllers scream – much faster than onboard RAID – and can handle up to 8 drives (in fact, I use another one in my home server with 4 1TB drives). Add a couple of WD Black 500GB drives in RAID 0 and you have about the fastest non-SSD system you could have for less than $250 – 1TB of fast storage for less than the cost of a 128GB SSD.

I have been very pleased with the performance. My machine is a quad core Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz (watercooled) with 8GB of RAM, and before the upgrade the disk lag was noticeable whereas the rest of the system screamed. Now everything is blazingly fast under Win7 64-bit.

Just a tip for those who want the best performance NOW without spending the money that SSD drives will set you back.

One more note – more than ever, you need to do backups if you use this method. In RAID 0, losing a single drive will cause you to lose data across the whole array, so in effect your potential failure rate is doubled for 2 drives, tripled for 3 drives, etc. I use Windows Home Server, which backs up all my machines every night automatically. I highly recommend it for the backup feature alone, but use whatever you want, just do your backups!

Now if only the OS would allow for putting documents and programs on another drive.

I tried it early this year when I built my home system using 64 bit Vista. It was a nightmare, because permissions don’t really allow moving the user folder without tearing deeper into the guts of the OS than I would like. The net was also little help, as the instructions varied considerably between sites. I finally did a nuke and pave to put everything back onto the one drive the way Go…Microsoft intended it.

I didn’t see an option for Windows 7, so didn’t bother looking.

The point of this is that if it takes several hours of tinkering to convince the OS that it really wants to put some things on another drive, most people aren’t going to want to do it anyway.